by David Drake
Oar blades curled into the water on either side. It was a ragged stroke with jolts like mallets knocking as shafts fouled one another, but it brought a cheer from the men on deck. Perennius could glimpse the second pirate ship now. It was nosing past the rising curve of the Eagle’s poop at a distance. The Germans were standing off wide to starboard instead of closing directly on the stern of their prey. Little more than half the liburnian’s oars were moving, given the damage to the oars and to the men who should have worked them. Besides that, the rowers must be exhausted from their earlier pull. Their second wind could not last long.
“I’d better go help Gaius with the ballista,” the agent said abruptly. “We were lucky once.” He turned.
“Wait,” said Calvus, touching Perennius’ arm. “Why don’t we ram them this time?” he went on. His dark eyes held the Tarantine’s.
Leonidas’ rage was predictable and this time uncontrolled. “Listen, fishbrain, I told you why we don’t ram! We—” Calvus raised his index finger in query. The captain’s flowing recapitulation choked off, though Leonidas himself seemed puzzled at the fact.
“I understood what you said,” the tall man agreed. Leonidas’ eyes bulged. The agent watched Calvus with a care dictated by more than present words. “We will lose our mast and sail, and our own hull may very well be hopelessly damaged. While there were two pirate ships pursuing us, those were valid arguments against ramming. Are they now?”
“Dammit, I’m not going to sink my ship!” Leonidas shouted.
“Blazes!” Perennius shouted back, aware that they were drawing attention away from the pirates. “We’ll sink ourselves, when the bastards drop us overboard, won’t we? Do you think it’s a joke, that they sacrifice prisoners to their sea gods? Or do you think they’ll just turn us all loose when they’ve stripped the ship?”
The Tarantine’s face worked as if he were forced to chew tar. “Pollux,” he muttered, “but we can’t stand to be boarded again, I know that.…”
Calvus touched the captain’s wrist. “You don’t want to shatter a thing that is in your charge, a thing that’s important to you,” he said softly. “That’s good. But there are times that we have to sacrifice things of greatest personal importance for the good of the race.”
For the Empire, Perennius thought, though he was no longer certain that Calvus had the Empire in mind when he spoke. In any case, Leonidas licked at the blood on his lip and said, “All right, I’ll do what I can.” The captain smiled bitterly. “She’s not much, you know,” he said. “Wallows like a pig and maybe won’t give us the angle we need as quick as we’ll need it. But we’ll do what we can. Fortune bless us.”
This time Calvus did not intervene as Leonidas and the agent turned to their respective tasks.
“You didn’t know anything about ships when you came aboard, did you?” Perennius asked quietly as he strode forward beside the tall man. “You didn’t know a damned thing about fighting in that alley in Rome. Blazes, that’s why I wanted you shut in the cabin, so you wouldn’t get in the way. What’s going on?”
Calvus smiled again. “Logic is the same, Aulus Perennius,” he said, “whether the units are ships or game pieces. Or men, of course.” It was a moment before he went on. The timbre of his voice was no longer quite the same. “The other, I think, concerns me more than it does you. The woman, Sabellia, said ‘They’ll never hold. Come on, there’s spears at the mast,’… and I followed her. That shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t what I was raised for.” He looked down at the Illyrian. There was no frown on his calm face, but the agent was sure that the statement of concern was true.
“I’m glad you got involved. You saved my ass,” Perennius said. He was trying to react to a problem which, as the traveller had suggested, he could not himself imagine. “All except my ass, I mean.” The agent attempted a smile. He was more nervous at the moment about a situation he did not understand than he was about the German pirates already drawing ahead of the Eagle. Perennius knew as well as any man how to deal with the Germans. The only question that remained was his ability to do so under the present circumstances. That would sort itself out very quickly.
“I’m glad for the results, my—companion,” the tall man replied. “But when a tool begins to act in unexpected ways, one naturally becomes concerned that it may no longer be fit for the job for which it was forged.”
“Tools!” the agent snorted as they joined the motley gang of armed men—and Bella, not to forget Bella—around the fighting tower.
“Aulus, the fucking ballista’s out of action,” Gaius said as he saw the agent. “Do we have a spare skein in one of the lockers? Fucking spear took three layers out of one of these!”
“All men are tools, Aulus Perennius,” the traveller concluded softly. “The tools of Mankind.”
“Sir, the coxswain won’t give me any oarsmen,” Sestius announced, “and I think he’s grabbed everybody whole from the deck crew besides. I can arm some of his castoffs for show—” the centurion’s glance swept the deck amidships where oarsmen sent up with broken limbs had congregated. They knew they would get no sympathy except from each other. “Or I can go below and show him that your orders are to be obeyed.”
Perennius nodded. He was glad that Sestius appreciated that the situation might have changed since he got his orders. Battles had been lost by the determination of hard-bitten subordinates to carry out instructions despite the manifest absurdity of those instructions. “Right, use what you’ve got on deck,” the agent said. “Looks like we need the rowers most at the moment, though blazes! I’d like those other sixty Marines.”
The agent paused. He was glad to be back in the midst of bloody disaster, out of the metaphysical swamp into which Calvus kept leading him. “Gaius,” he said, “let’s look—” his wound chewed up all the nerves on the right side of his body as he stepped toward the fighting tower. “Blazes! Well, I’ll take your word for it, and it’s maybe a good thing anyhow.” Perennius recollected how the damage had probably occurred. “Anyhow, it kept a spear out of my back. Another spear. Take the ballista apart, look like you’re working on it, and make sure those bastards see what’s going on.”
He waved toward the Germans. They were still more than a bowshot away and well up on the liburnian’s forequarter. The German commander seemed to have enough influence with his men to keep them balanced across the deck of his ship for now. With luck, that discipline would break down as the pirates made their run in.
Gaius looked startled at his protector’s orders. “But s-sir,” he said, “we can bluff them with the ballista even if we can’t fix it. If I dismantle the thing, they’ll know they don’t have to be afraid of fire.” He peered at Perennius as if he were expecting to see evidence of a head wound in addition to the bandage on the agent’s upper thigh.
“We’re going to try something different,” Perennius said. He did not care if Gaius knew they were planning to ram, but he was worried about the effect on the others. If the Marines suddenly ran sternward for fear that the deck would lift beneath them, it might give the plan away to the pirates. And it was, despite the danger, the only plan that Perennius could imagine having even a chance of success. “We want this crew to come in just the way the first ones did.”
The eyes of the younger Illyrian narrowed, but he gave a curt nod of assent. He cursed as the latter gave him a reminder of his shoulder wound, but he got to work promptly and obviously with his wrenches.
Sestius was bullying and cajoling injured sailors to pick up weapons in their good hands. Some of the men were hunched over cracked ribs or were weaving from concussion. Most of them would be able to stand with a spear leaned against them and at least give the appearance of defense. The survivors of the original Marine contingent looked glumly from their reinforcements to the hundred or more Germans. The pirates shouted as they eased in with a brail or two furled in the canvas. Several of the Marines seemed to be in no better condition than the broken seamen who were joining them.
Her voice broke into what was less a reverie than a waking nightmare, as the agent surveyed his troops. He looked at the woman, then took from her the silken sling. It ran through his fingers undamaged, slick and deadly and quite useless to him now that it would tear him open to use it. Just a tool, unnecessary now and easily to be replaced … but Perennius smiled and took the sling and dropped it back into his pouch with the remainder of the bullets. “Glad you found it,” he said truthfully.
Sabellia’s short hair was damp. She had taken the time to wash the gore from it and her face before approaching the agent. Julia had had black hair, but both of the women were short and had the same non-Gallic—non-Aryan—features. “What should the rest of us do now?” she asked, and the voice was an echo both of the far past and of the alley in Rome where—
Perennius felt his skin grow hot with a surmise for which he had neither evidence nor time. He deliberately lifted his right leg, pivoting it at the hip so that the icy pain would sear away all thought of other times. “We stand to arms, looking like we’re preparing to be boarded,” he heard his voice say as the world narrowed down to the present again. He lowered his leg carefully. “Might help if we looked like we were scared to death.” He glanced past Sabellia to the pirates. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”
As Perennius spoke, the German seamen committed their craft. The pirates had been bellying over the waves some thousand feet from the liburnian—ahead and starboard on a parallel course. Their helmsman was a grizzled man whose hair and beard flared with milkweed fluff from beneath his peaked iron helmet. He threw the crossbar of his steering oar hard forward. The bow of his ship swung to port. The beitass was already clamped in place. As the port leech of the sail came up-wind, its two divisions damped each other fluttering at the rigid pole.
The helmsman gave a raw-voiced command. Loin-clouted Herulians snubbed or slacked the lines at which they were stationed, whichever the need might be. The square, leather-tightened sail swung on the mast to catch the wind at increasingly closer angles. As it did so, the sail’s leverage rotated the vessel through the medium of the sailors straining at their lines. Gothic landsmen ducked or cursed as sheets snapped toward them.
Gaius jumped down from the tower, a perfect, boot-first arc controlled by his left palm on the wooden parapet. The tip of his scabbard rang on the deck as his knees flexed to absorb the shock. “A fine time to see how they’d swallow a ballista dart,” the youth said with a toss of his head toward the pirates. He drew his long-bladed spatha. The nicks in its edge were obvious now that the steel had been rinsed of its coating of blood.
Perennius was returning to the state of mindless calm with which he generally entered battle. He was vaguely aware that Calvus stood beside him. The traveller was as still and erect as the pike in his hands. “Yes,” the agent said. He imagined the chaos among the Germans if their seamen dropped their straining lines when a missile screamed down at them. Then he said, “Here they come.”
The pirate craft had seemed to hover as it came about. Its starboard side, to leeward, had dipped and rolled a great swell in the direction of previous motion. Neither the keel nor the shallow draft of the German vessel were adequate to keep her from making leeway, sliding broadside over the sea. Because the Eagle was still plowing forward on the same course, however, the imperfection of the lighter vessel’s sailing was disguised.
The pirates hung like a missile at the top of its arc. Then their ship began to slide toward the liburnian at a falling missile’s deadly, increasing pace as well. Behind the agent, Leonidas was calling directions to his coxswain and steersmen alternately. Beside Perennius, Sestius repeated in stumbling Syriac the orders he had just given his men in Greek and Latin. “Keep your shields low. Duck beneath them but don’t raise the shields or the bastards’ll hock you sure from below.”
Still slipping to starboard, but with enough way on to curl water around its bow, the pirate vessel bore down through bowshot to javelin-throw. The liburnian was moving at a fast walk. Cutting into the wind as she was, the German craft could add no more than a knot to the closing speed. That the rush together of prey and slayer seemed so awesomely fast was an effect of the players’ size. No beast carries forty tons above the surface, and the sail swelling over the pirates’ deck at a sharp angle to starboard added bulk beyond its mass. A German archer, ordered sternward by men whose honor lay in their spears, managed to put an arrow through the forward leech of his own sail.
Perennius knew the men with him on deck were tensely listening for the sound of thole-pins being pulled and the oars themselves being shipped rattlingly as they had been during the first attack. Instead, the pattern of stroking remained the same, only one per four seconds, because the oarsmen were exhausted. The volume diminished, however, as for a stroke and another stroke the starboard oarsmen marked time with their blades lifted high and dripping back into the sea.
There was a hoarse cry from among the pirates. Even the Goths understood what was about to happen sooner than did the men on the liburnian’s deck. The view of the men on the Eagle was blocked by the fighting tower and the overhang of the deck. The liburnian’s bluff bow swung starboard half a point. The German craft a hundred, fifty, twenty feet away would have crunched along the starboard hull as her predecessor had done. Now the curling bowsprit and the jib for the unset boat-sail bisected the view of onrushing attackers.
As Perennius had anticipated, the pirates had shifted forward when the ships closed. Their weight lifted the stern and dissolved the last chance that the Herulian steersman would be able to prevent the Roman plan from succeeding. All the liburnian’s oars stroked together once more. The pirates’ sail was slatting down according to prearranged plan. It was unable to change their attitude at the last instant, and the steering oar only clipped the wavetops with the load of warriors forward.
The Eagle rode the Germans down with the merciless assurance of a landslide.
The liburnian had been designed to hole her opponents below the waterline when she rammed. Her projecting bronze beak had been removed when she was laid up, however, and it had not seemed either practical or necessary to the agent to have it refitted before they set out. As a result, it was the liburnian’s up-curved stem-piece which made the first contact with the pirate craft. It rode over the Germans’ gunwale just starboard of their cutwater.
The crash threw down everyone in both ships.
One of Sestius’s Marines rolled over the edge, but his screams were lost in other sounds. For long seconds, mechanical noise was the only thing which the world permitted to exist. Though the pirate ship was smaller and lighter, it was built Northern fashion of rough-sawn oak. Its hull could not withstand the mass of the liburnian, but it resisted to the point of mutual destruction as the aged pine planking ground through it.
The Eagle’s mast snapped at the deck. The mast could be stepped or unstepped depending on whether the ship was being readied for cruising or war. The certainty that the larger vessel would be crippled if it rammed with its sail set had probably convinced the Herulian captain that nothing of the sort could be intended. Like Leonidas, he was too much a seaman to imagine another captain so wantonly destroying his own vessel. Perennius, living through the result the Tarantine had forseen, wondered whether the traveller’s persuasion had been only verbal.
The mast partners, the great timbers that spread the thrust of the sail across six deck beams, held—forcing the mast itself to shear just above them. Tons of mast, spar, and canvas lurched forward, driven by its inertia and the breeze still trying to fill the collapsing sail. The mast itself struck the parapet of the fighting tower and continued driving forward. The rear wall of the tower smashed in and all the cleats pulled out of the deck. Even so, the tower saved the contingent standing forward to repel boarders. The top-hamper would otherwise have spread general death and maiming among them.
What was happening aboard the pirate craf
t defied belief.
The German warriors had been screaming insults and descriptions of their battle prowess as the two ships drew closer. When the pirates realized what was about to happen, even the front rank of slaughter-maddened berserkers was shocked into a different—if no more sane—state of mind. Men who had steeled themselves to face swords and missiles realized that eighty tons of timber would make no more of their courage than it made of the water creaming to either side of the prow. Their surge forward, shields raised, spears clanging, suddenly reversed into a panicked flight toward the stern with all weapons dropped or forgotten.
The attempt to escape was both useless and too late. The gunwale splintered. The pirates’ bow dipped under with a rush. Panicked warriors were ground between pine keel and oak decking like olives in a press. The wood shrieked louder than the men.
The sea did not enter the pirate craft through a hole but rather over the whole forward half of the ship. The stern heaved up, throwing the furious steersman to meet the oncoming Eagle with the broken tiller in his hands. The sea churned up foam and blood and splinters as the liburnian plowed on.
The low-decked pirate vessel squeezed sideways with its port hull in the air. Its own mast did not break as the liburnian’s had: it ripped apart the keel into which it was butted. As the ship went fully under water, it belched a huge gulp of air which had been trapped by the suddenness of the disaster between the hull timbers and the decking immediately over them. Then the pirate ship was gone. With it went almost every one of the men who had been screaming for blood less than a minute before.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Eagle herself was proceeding only on inertia. The shock had thrown her oarsmen off their stroke and generally off their benches, though there was nothing like the number of serious injuries below that the first attack had caused. The previous impact had been transmitted through the oars and the men who had cushioned it with their bodies. This time, the liburnian’s hull had no such cushion. What that meant was not long to be explored.